


Baby, You're a Work of Art

by Lucy_Claire



Category: X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Erik is Crushing Harder than a 12-year Old Girl, Human AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2018-07-14 17:00:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7181405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucy_Claire/pseuds/Lucy_Claire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik is bullied into taking Life Art class by Raven, and it's just his luck that the model for today's class is Charles Xavier.</p><p>Cue Erik ogling Charles, Charles's bad flirting and Erik having a minor morality crisis about how young Charles looks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baby, You're a Work of Art

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Art Class AU requested by Tumblr user nix-hiver

There were a lot of things he could say no to, especially a lot of harebrained ideas Raven pulled off the top of her head, but there were times were the persistent nagging, bouncing and “Please! Please! Please!” made him give in. Or consider giving in. That was until Raven broke the ice with “You should take an art class.”

“I’m an engineer,” said Erik. “I know how to draw quite fine, thank you.”

“You never draw for fun anymore and you only draw buildings and shit.”

“Buildings and shit, that’s what you reduce my job to?”

Raven pulled her lollipop out of her mouth to twist her mouth to the side in an unimpressed manner. “Well, that’s what it is.”

Erik sat back in his office chair and rubbed his hands over his face. “What do you want, Raven?”

“I want you to go to a life art class with me in Hank’s university — and hold your ego, Picasso, it’s just for fun.”

“Picasso was a terrible artist, all his paintings were disgusting.”

Raven rolled her eyes. “The point is, you need to have some fun, and since you won’t go out drinking with me, or come to any of my parties, or literally do anything fun and relaxing —”

“Why am I friends with you again?”

“— You should at least start drawing for pleasure again, since you aren’t doing much else for pleasure.”

Erik lowered his hands to glare at her from between his fingers. “You’ve got some nerve.”

Raven threw up her arms and danced in her chair triumphantly for some reason. “That’s why you love me.”

“I don’t.”

“You love me, and you’re coming to that life art class on Sunday.”

“Am not.”

“You are.”

“Am not.”

“You aaaaaaare.”

“Raven.”

“Erik.”

_“Raven.”_

“Erik!”

“Raven!”

“Donkey!”

Erik was startled into silence, blinking a few times at her. “What?”

“Art class, Sunday, that’s what.”

“Why is this so important to you?”

“I don’t want you to become a miserly old man that ends up alone and joyless and visited by three ghosts on Christmas,” Raven said with a grin. “Quit bah humbug-ing me and come draw, Ebenezer.”

Erik slammed his hands on his guest. “Fine. Fine! I’ll come to your fucking naked people class. Now leave, I still have three hours of work.”

Raven skipped out of his office, cackling gleefully. He couldn’t guess what she was up to.

 

* * *

 

Erik showed up in the Arts college of Columbia University at 10 AM that Sunday to find a class full of girls save for three or four boys. He had to be the only person here over twenty-five.

“Great, just great,” he grumbled, taking one of the last empty seats at the front. “Fucking Raven dragging me here and taking her sweet time to show up.”

Erik set up his sketchpad, sharpened his pencils and counted his erasers as he forced a straight-backed posture on his stool. He hasn’t sat in a backless chair in front of a blank page in a few months now, even when he draws up his blueprints he still hunches a bit or uses a chair with a back even if he leans away from it in concentration.

Concentration seemed to be the last thing on these kids’ minds, as they exchanged hushed and excited giggles about the model they were getting today, all he caught was that it was someone from this university not an aspiring model or bored housewife.

The gossip died down once someone else came in and headed for the low, round seat in front of Erik. As he was texting Raven another _where the fuck are you???_ Erik didn’t look up until he heard their model speak.

“Good morning, everyone, I see we have a packed room today,” said a calm, soothing voice, British and filled with humor. Erik looked up to find a young man with his back to him, wearing half a grey suit — the vest and trousers — and a white shirt that was rolled up to his elbows. His dark auburn-ish hair glinted brown and red in the sunlight that poured from the high windows sitting beneath the sloping ceiling and his body, while small, was compact and eye-catching. The most eye-catching part of him was his ass, being done a world of favours by those well-fitted trousers.

Erik was forced to tear his eyes away from his ass when he turned around. His soft and approachable baby face would usually be something that turned Erik off, as he didn’t date or not like being attracted to college students, but his eyes were the biggest and bluest Erik had ever seen, catching the light in a way that made them glow. It was a chore not to stare.

He clapped and rubbed his hands together, saying, “I see a lot of familiar faces today,” which garnered a lot of laughs for some unknown reason.

“Do you lot come here on the regular aside from studying genetics or are you all just here for me?” he teased, getting more laughs.

The man’s eyes finally landed on Erik as he popped upon the top button of his vest, his bright gaze looking close to shooting lasers through Erik’s head. “For those of you who don’t know, I'm Charles and I came to model for you this morning as part of a bet with my cousin.”

“What did you stand to lose in this bet?” Erik found himself asking.

“Getting to dye her hair blue was her offer, and it’s a color that doesn’t suit her, so it might humble her for a few months,” said Charles, popping open another button.

“Take it off!” whooped a girl from the back.

“Sorry, Jubilee, but I’m keeping my clothes on for this one.” Charles said cheekily, hopping up on the central seat and grabbing the edges so leaned forward slightly. “Tell me when I can move.”

Everyone immediately got to work. Erik texted Raven again with threats of clapping her in irons or subjecting her to Chinese water torture. She finally answered _sorry, something came up! Learn to have fun without meeeeee!_ and he got more annoyed.

“Shouldn’t you be drawing?” Charles asked him quietly, one eyebrow raised.

Erik set down his phone and picked up his pencil, smiling awkwardly and briefly as he started to sketch Charles’s outline, the title of his shoulders, the angles of his legs and the length of his neck. Erik’s style had become very stiff over the years of sketching objects and plans rather than anything with curves, features and proper shading.

“My friend bailed on me, after she nagged me into coming today.”

“Any idea why she would do that?”

“She claims I need to try drawing something fun, or drawing for fun.”

“You draw for a living? Are you an animator?” Charles asked, risking a tilt of his head in interest.

“Engineer.”

“What kind of engineer?” Charles asked.

Erik cleared his throat, mouth going very dry at Charles’s focused gaze.“Metallurgical, primarily. What do you study?”

“Genetics.”

Erik went on to add the specifics that shaped Charles’s small body, his hands, the material of his trousers, shirt and vest and rounding the edges of his shoulders, forearms and sides of his thighs as we went about them. There was so much beauty in such simplicity. He had missed this, sketching something living, drawing it for no true purpose but his own practice and amusement, and the best part was drawing something pleasing to eye. Charles was very pretty — pleasing.

“What interested you in something so particular?” Erik tried to ask casually, clearing his throat again as he met Charles’s eyes, they were an inhuman shade of blue in this light.

“As far as I could remember I always wondered why people turned out looking the way they did. This probably started around the time I met a redheaded girl with brown-haired brown-eyed parents and found out that each parent had a red-haired grandparent, and I’ve wanted to understand how that could possibly work ever since.”

Erik ran a hand through his own hair, it was a dark red, almost brown and neither of his parents had it either but his father’s father did. “What can you tell about someone just by looking at their features?”

“A lot, it would be like reading your ancestry in a way. For instance, by the shape of your face and brow I can tell that you’re of some sort of Germanic descent, and by the kind of skin you have that you burn rather tan quite awfully, something comes hand-in-hand with having reddish hair.”

“I am German,” Erik confirmed, amused. “I figured I masked my accent.”

“You have, you sound decidedly Irish.”

“I lived in Ireland for a few years as a foreign exchange student, the accent stuck. What about you?” Erik asked, becoming more and more alarmed by his inability to take his eyes off this kid, this very baby-faced kid.

Charles removed one hand to shake the numbness before setting back down. “What about me?”

“Are you an exchange student?”

“Oh, no, I started living here in America part-time as a child, I’ve moved back and forth due to different universities but now I’ve settled in Columbia.”

Smart kid, to bounce from campus to campus he either got a lot of offers or blew through his courses fast enough to stack up on a few degrees.

When the sound turning papers filled the room, Charles changed his position, crossing his legs and setting his chin in his palm and his elbow on his thigh, looking deep into Erik’s eyes.Erik could feel his legs turning to jelly and his hand going limp as it tried sketching out his hair.

Erik forced himself to look away, spinning the thought of “Too young, too young,” in his head. He couldn’t be more than twenty-two, and Erik was thirty-four. He felt like a creep, but he had no choice but to stare at every part of his face as he drew him.

He had thick skin that had a few creases of one too many nights gone without sleep, under his eyes and around his mouth,his red, red mouth —

Erik shook his head, rousing himself. He couldn’t start drooling in front of him.

“You alright, my friend?” Charles asked him teasingly, kicking his foot.

Erik nodded and went back to his sketch.

“So, why did you move here from Germany?”

Erik didn’t answer, he continued drawing, cursing Raven for getting him into this predicament.

“Did you move here for work?” Charles prodded, toeing Erik’s leg.

Erik moved back his leg, feeling his ears burn red.

“That immersed in drawing, are we?” Charles tried joking. “I must be such a sight.”

Erik sketched faster, shaking the hair and clothes, feeling like he didn’t tear himself away right now he would give into Charles’s flirting.

“What’s the matter?” Charles toes Erik’s leg again. “That deep in conversation?”

“Are you always this talkative?” Erik finally responded, finishing the bouncy outlines of Charles’s hair.

“I’m not used to quiet, I’m always hearing chatter around me, in classes, at home, in the street, in shops, so I find silence unsettling.”

“How do you sleep then, if not in silence?” Erik asked.

“I listen to audiobooks and podcasts, just having it run in the background helps a great deal.”

“Wouldn’t that get in the way of trying to sleep?” Erik asked, shadowing Charle’s nose. “I would keep wanting to pay attention to what’s happening and not get any sleep.”

“I keep the volume low enough to sound like distant droning, like sitting in a boring lecture or having someone read you a bedtime story.”

At both those mentions, Erik almost snapped his pencil, thinking “Young. So, young. Practically a child.”

God, he felt old.

Erik shook the thought off and moved on to the most difficult facial feature of all — the eyes. No matter how much effort and measurements went into spacing and setting the eyes, something would always go wrong. One would come out much bigger than the other, tilting up at the corner or even if it was done well enough, by the time he finished with the first eye and moved on to draw the second, there was a chance of smudging the first eye. A problem he now faced as he finished outlining the first of Charles’s big soul-gazing eyes.

“Piece of paper,” Charles said.

“Pardon?”

“Put a piece of paper over the side you’re about to set your hand on, that way you won’t ruin the drawing and get lead all over your hand.”

Erik’s jaw dropped. Over all these years of sketches and designs, that thought rarely occurred to him, usually because in the bigger sketches, he used transparent squares layered on top of one another to form one big picture.

He switched the paper back and forth as he carefully added as little pressure as possible to the pencil, trying to capture as much of those amazing eyes as he could. He could drown in this eyes.

“Are you wearing contacts?”

Charles blinked a little slower, dragging his long lashes up distractingly. “No, these are my eyes.”

“Can you explain that with genetics?” Erik asked stupidly.

“Well, yes, blue eyes started out as a mutation, mine are a rarer sort, more vivid.”

“Yes, they are.”

It was in that moment he realized he was flirting. He went back to shading and detailing the eyes and then spent a good amount of time on the hair.

Somewhere, a bell rang. Everyone got up to put away their things and Charles got up to stretch.

Erik was about to rush out when Charles caught him by the elbow. “What’s the rush?”

“I have to go find my friend and strangle her for getting me into this mess.”

“What mess?”

Erik now wanted to slap himself for letting that out. Thankfully, Charles spoke before he could say anything else. “Would you like to join me for a cup of coffee?”

Half of him wanted to say yes and the other said he couldn’t say yes with a good conscience.

“Listen, Charles, I can see that you’re interested —”

“And I can see that you’re interested too, what’s the problem?”

“It’s quite a long story, but out of my personal experience, I don’t believe in dating anyone I could have any kind of power over, be it age or job or otherwise,” Erik said, trying to be as formal as possible. “I don’t date students.”

“Students?” Charles frowned, reaching into his pockets. “I’m not a student, Erik, I teach here.”

“You’re a TA?”

Charles handed him a business card.

_Prof. Charles F. Xavier,_

_Genetics. Science Department._

_University of Columbia, NY._

 

Erik’s eyes were about to jump out of his head, it was either at Professor or Xavier. “Xavier. You. _Raven._ ”

Charles released his arm. “You know her?”

“She’s the one that talked me into coming here.”

“She’s the one who bet me to coming here.”

They laughed awkwardly.

“So, you’re a professor,” said Erik. “How old are you? Because you look deceptively young, young enough to spin me into a crisis.”

“Twenty-seven. You?”

“Thirty-four.”

“Now that we’ve all went and established that Raven set us up and that I’m not a child, would you like to get coffee?”

Relieved, Erik grinned, offering Charles his arm. “Yes, I really would.”

Charles linked his arm with Erik’s and they walked out.

It turns out his eyes turned a further inhuman shade of blue in the sun and Erik was mesmerised. He would thank Raven later.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [**Tumblr**](http://lucyclairedelune.tumblr.com)!
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> Don't forget to comment! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧


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